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Tag Archives | NSA surveillance

Sec. of State John Kerry thinks Edward Snowden should “man up” and come home because he exposed massive criminality and Orwellian spying by the government on its citizens. Kerry’s bleatings are what passes for leadership and governance in the compromised corrupt cesspool that is DC where truth is always a victim.

Kerry argued that he should make his case openly and freely in the U.S. criminal justice system.

“Instead he’s sitting there taking pot shots at his country, violating the oath that he took,” Kerry said.

Snowden didn’t take an oath. His was a contractor not an employee. Kerry is lying and almost certainly knows this. He of course, never says a word about illegal surveillance and NSA officials lying under oath. The best he can do is feebly insult Snowden.

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RSA, it can be safely assumed, is now an appendage of NSA, releasing dumbed-down cryptolographic products that are easily hacked. This is the second time this has happened.

Security provider RSA endowed its BSAFE cryptography toolkit with a second NSA-influenced random number generator (RNG) that’s so weak it makes it easier for eavesdroppers to decrypt protected communications.

“If using Dual Elliptic Curve is like playing with matches, then adding Extended Random is like dousing yourself with gasoline.”

Avoid all RSA products. They are not your friend. What a sad end to a once hugely respected company.

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Well, I’m glad we’ve got that straightened out. And here I thought the Snowden documents clearly showed massive, illegal spying by NSA on just about anything that moves. So happy Sen. Dianne Feinstein reassures us we’re just a bunch of silly-heads, fretting about nothing. Not to worry, Very Important People are handling the situation.

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Well done, NSA! Your endless (and illegal) surveillance is damaging credibility and profits of US tech companies. NSA snooping has confirmed the worst fears of the populace about the intentions of their government. The political damage to the US government is huge and worldwide. US tech companies were and are obedient, compliant lapdogs for NSA, cheerfully working with them to insure software sold to us was broken and compromised. Hey, there was big money and juicy government contracts to be had and all tech had to do was sell out the American public, something they happily did for years.

Big tech began their faux outrage at NSA only after the Snowden revelations and have done nothing substantive to fight against such outrages. Thus, they have poisoned their own wells and now have to live with the consequences of their own callous irresponsibility, craven behavior, and possible criminality.

Cisco, IBM, Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard have reported declines in business in China since the NSA surveillance program was exposed. The Information Technology & Innovation Foundation estimates the NSA imbroglio will cost U.S. businesses $22 billion through 2016. Forrester Research pegs potential losses at $180 billion, which includes tech firms and managed service providers.

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The Tor Instant Messaging Bundle plans to do what their Tor browser already does for web surfing, encrypt and hide instant messaging from prying eyes, including NSA. It will route encrypted messages through Tor hidden servers just like the browser does, NSA hates Tor because they can’t break into it.

It’s a measure of Tor’s reliability that a secret NSA presentation — labeled “top secret” — sports the title “Tor Stinks.” The presentation reads, “We will never be able to de-anonymize all Tor users all the time,” and adds, “With manual analysis we can de-anonymize a very small fraction of Tor users.” But that de-anonymization, to date, appears to have been random. Notably, the agency reports no success at unmasking the identity — in response to a specific intelligence or law enforcement demand — of a specific requested Tor user.

The Tor IM bundle will be able to use multiple chat clients, then send the messages through the hidden servers. The first public beta is planned for this month.